American Titan: Searching for John Wayne Read online

  The film starred Janet Leigh as a Russian pilot who lands in Alaska seeking asylum. Hughes, one of Hollywood’s legendary womanizers, had a scene added to the Jules Furthman script (Furthman also produced) that had Lieutenant Anna Marladovna (Leigh) strip off her clothes and reveal her shapely body while being searched for concealed weapons, after which the reluctant Colonel Shannon (Wayne) is assigned to be her guardian. Somehow they wind up in Palm Springs, and Leigh is subsequently filmed in very Western-style negligees. She falls in love with Shannon and sheds her allegiance to Communism.

  The only production problem with the film was the same old problem for Hughes: he couldn’t finish. It was not a financial problem (obviously) but a psychological one; Jet Pilot had become his latest neurotic fetish, an anti-Communist piece of political propaganda, costarring Leigh’s body and equally great aviation footage. He would to continue to play with this toy for years, until, with several additional aerial sequences shot and added, he eventually released it in 1957.

  After filming the bulk of his scenes, Wayne returned to filming more Cold War propaganda, where the characters he played were less material and more message-bearing. The opening credits to Operation Pacific included this line: “When the Pacific Fleet was destroyed by the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, it remained for the submarines to carry the war to the enemy. In the four years that followed, our undersea craft sank six million tons of Japanese shipping including some of the proudest ships of the Imperial Navy. Fifty-two of our submarines and thirty-five hundred officers and men were lost. It is to these men and the entire silent service that this picture is humbly dedicated.”

  Operation Pacific is a World War II Pearl Harbor vengeance submarine drama, filmed on location in Hawaii and at the Warner Bros studio in Burbank, where a full-size replica of the submarine Thunder was reconstructed. The film was written and directed by George Waggner, produced by Louis Edelman, and costarred Wayne’s buddy Ward Bond and the lovely Patricia Neal. The sophisticated Neal was in real life deeply in love with Gary Cooper, and perhaps that was one reason she did not get along at all with Wayne during production of a war picture in which Wayne gets to play action hero and broad-shouldered lover.

  The film was made under the personal supervision of Jack Warner, with technical adviser Admiral Charles A. Lockwood, who had been the commander of submarine forces in the Pacific during World War II. With Korea heating up, World War II pictures once more became less complicated and more patriotic, the perfect propaganda machine, to stir up support for America’s next conflict in Asia. With Operation Pacific Wayne began a new seven-year nonexclusive contract with Warner Bros at a minimum base salary of $175,000 per picture and an automatic $50,000 payment each time it was rereleased.

  Released in January 1951, Operation Pacific was not well received by critics. Time magazine called it “[a] tiresome love versus duty romance . . . Actor Wayne’s flinty authority as a man of action crumbles under the trite situations and dialogue ashore . . . what should be Operation Pacific’s strongest point proves its major disappointment: the action at sea.” Variety liked it better, but not by much: “Marquee weight of John Wayne’s name in the action field and other good selling points offset the rather formula conception and give it sturdy chances . . . Wayne registers with his usual punch.” Audiences disagreed. Made for $1,465,000, the film grossed just under $9 million worldwide. Even with less than great material, Wayne was still box-office boffo, as Variety would say.

  He then went directly into RKO Radio Pictures’ Flying Leathernecks, produced by Howard Hughes and finished reasonably on time. It was shot in glorious Technicolor and released, while Jet Pilot remained trapped in the sociopathology of Hughes completion issues for another six years. Flying Leathernecks was directed by the very un-Hughes-like Nicholas Ray, the second of five straight films he’d make for Hughes, and who would, a few years later, gain new fame as the director of James Dean in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause.

  Flying Leathernecks was shot at Camp Pendleton Marine Base and at the RKO-Pathé studios at a negative cost of just under $1.2 million and grossed nearly six times that. It was another financial hit in this burst of Wayne films that continued to feature a mythic military Wayne World War II hero who floats through them like a revisionist apparition, reinforcing his good-guy soldier image as an all-American hero (in this film he is in charge of the battle against the Japanese at Guadalcanal). In 1951, Wayne for the second year was voted the most popular star in Hollywood, according to the all-important Motion Picture Herald annual poll of exhibitors.

  To get him to make this film, Hughes renegotiated Wayne’s nonexclusive contract with RKO. Wayne asked for and received $300,000 (paid out at $1,000 a week) because Hughes wanted to keep making movies for him.101 He was willing to do anything for him except produce Wayne’s long-standing pet project, a film about the Alamo. In fact, not just RKO but no studio in Hollywood showed any interest in Wayne’s pet project, even with him producing and directing as well as starring in it.

  JOHN FORD, MEANWHILE, HAD MADE Wagon Master (1950) with Ward Bond and Ben Johnson, which failed at the box office and ended Argosy’s relationship with RKO. Ford had wanted Wayne for the film, but knew that he was not eager to return to the fold after the throttling he had taken from the director during She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Even when Ford managed to sign Maureen O’Hara to be in it, Wayne wouldn’t bite.

  Ford then set out on a public path of reconciliation. He wrote an usually laudatory piece about Wayne for the popular movie magazine Photoplay, after he’d agreed to accompany him to Reno, Nevada, to take part in the festivities for “John Wayne Day,” during which the star received that city’s annual award—“Best Western Performance of the Year”—for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Ford’s piece for Photoplay amounted to nothing less than a public apology, in the form of a ghostwritten love letter that appeared in the magazine that March, in which “Ford” declared: “I can’t think of a better time than now—when Duke Wayne is sitting on the top of the heap—to say that he’s my boy. Always has been; always will be.” After recapping his own (rightful) importance in Wayne’s career, Ford then declared, “In all of the adventure films which he has made for me . . . Duke’s power as a man has contributed immeasurably to the integrity of those films . . . I don’t believe there is an honor, a testimonial, or an award which Duke cannot bear in good grace, and like the true gentleman that he is beneath the roughneck exterior. Years ago, just before we made Stagecoach, I told Duke that he had a great future ahead of him. If it were not already so obvious, I would tell him the same thing today.”

  TO MAKE THE QUIET MAN, the 123rd film of Wayne’s career, Yates gave Ford a $1.4 million budget (Ford had wanted $1.75 million, but Yates would not go that high).102 Wayne agreed to make the picture to help out Ford’s career. Even if it failed, which everyone associated with it except Ford expected it to do, Wayne believed it wouldn’t hurt his career. As Ward Bond, also in the movie, put it, “There is no other actor than Duke who ever survived so many bad pictures.”

  Production began in June 1951, on location in Ireland, and after six weeks filming was completed in July in Hollywood, nearly half the film shot on Republic Studios’ main lot. This was the only Republic picture ever shot in Technicolor (rather than the studio’s own Trucolor, which did not compare in quality, and whose prints tended to quickly fade to a purple tint).

  Yates, who was present for the duration, often and loudly complained to Ford about every aspect of the production, beginning with its title. He wanted Ford to change it to The Fighter and the Colleen. Ford said no. Yates complained after viewing the dailies that the film looked too “green.” Ford ignored him. The location cinematographer, Winton C. Hoch, would go on to win an Oscar.

  IT WASN’T ONLY AS A favor to Ford that Wayne agreed to make the picture. He was desperate to get out of town. The tension between him and Chata had become unbearable and he also wanted to get away from horses and uniforms for a while and give himself time to
formulate a new plan of attack for his stalled Alamo project. As he told one interviewer: “I want to get out of the saddle and away from the uniform. When I do The Quiet Man for John Ford in Ireland that will be different. I [will] play a prize-fighter who has killed a man in the ring and doesn’t want to fight anymore. He becomes involved in a fight when he goes to Ireland, a fight that goes on in field, town, pub, and everywhere else. The fighters go in and have drinks and start fighting all over again. That should be a riot, as Ford will do it. I like the idea of the comedy possibilities.” It also gave him opportunity to work again with his favorite costar, Maureen O’Hara.

  At the last minute, Chata—who was jealous of all Wayne’s leading ladies, but especially O’Hara, who she believed wanted to steal Wayne away from her—decided to take herself and Wayne’s four kids, Michael, Patrick, Toni, and Melinda, to Ireland for the duration of the shoot. She knew he wouldn’t say no to her if his children came along (they appear in one scene sitting in a car during the Innisfree horse race). She was right, he couldn’t, but he was not at all happy about the situation.

  The Quiet Man, with all its boozy Irish sentimentality, was about aging. Ford was fifty-five when he made it; Wayne, forty-four. Both looked older than their years, prematurely aged by sailing in the sun, drink, the pressures of the film business, and difficult marriages. The Quiet Man was certainly Ford’s most personal, if not the best film of his career. Wayne’s character’s name is Sean Thornton (Sean is the Irish version of John). The action is set in the fictitious village of Innisfree, the name inspired by a Yeats poem.

  The Quiet Man, despite its comic fistfight climax, is not at all a violent film, or a somber one. It is, essentially, a love story between Sean, who has come home to the land where he was born, and Mary Kate (O’Hara), whom he falls in love with. Sean soon runs into trouble with her brother, Red Will (Victor McLaglen), when he refuses to pay his sister’s dowry. Mary Kate takes her anger out on Sean—no dowry means no lovemaking. Sean is humiliated by Kate’s refusal to let him sleep in her bed and the whole town knowing it, and that leads to the big fistfight, the “final shoot-out” that settles everything.

  During production, it was widely rumored that Ford and O’Hara were continuing their supposed love affair that had begun during She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and that when they had a lovers’ quarrel it interrupted shooting for a few days. O’Hara disputes this in her memoir, saying that Ford had lapsed into a depression during the film and that was the real reason the production stalled. Her version sounds truer. Ford stayed in bed during the halt, surrounded by O’Hara, Wayne, and Bond, begging them to not let him get drunk again.

  She also denies another, more prevalent rumor that had spread throughout Hollywood, that despite the presence of his wife and children, she was having an affair with Wayne: “Duke and I were never involved romantically. We were never lovers . . . I never saw the Duke with his boots off . . . while we were shooting The Quiet Man, a story was released in the United States that Duke and I were fooling around on the set . . . the article said an anonymous source present on the set provided the details. I was furious and stormed into John Ford’s office, demanding to know, ‘Who would do such a terrible thing?’ The old man answered without a blink, ‘I did. It’ll sell more tickets.’ ”

  AFTER A SLOW START, THE film began to gather steam toward its two most famous love scenes, the first of which was shot in the rain in the cemetery. Thunder frightens Mary Kate and she runs under an arch. Sean takes off his coat and wraps it around her. Then they kiss, the most erotic scene in all of Wayne’s pictures. O’Hara: “I was the only leading lady big enough and tough enough for John Wayne. Duke’s presence was so strong that when audiences saw him finally meet a woman of equal hell and fire, it was exciting and thrilling . . . so during those moments of tenderness, when the lovemaking was about to begin, audiences saw for a half second that he had finally tamed me—but only for that half second.”

  The second was the windblown embrace during which Wayne passionately kisses O’Hara after which she slaps him (it was actually filmed on a soundstage in Hollywood using two airplane propellers to create the dramatic wind that blows open the door).

  When Ford delivered his final cut of 129 minutes, Yates blew a gasket. He had instructed Ford to keep it under two hours, to ensure two showings a night in theaters. At one of the first screenings of the film, just as the fistfight was about to begin, the screen went white. Yates jumped up and ran to the projection room to see what the problem was. No problem, Ford said, who was standing next to the projector with a pair of scissors. Ford told Yates he had cut the last twenty-nine minutes to bring the film down to the studio head’s limit.

  The fight footage was restored, and the film released at 129 minutes.

  BACK HOME, WAYNE TOOK CHATA away for a quick vacation to Acapulco, but as soon as they unpacked their bags, they began to fight. Chata left before Wayne did, and when he returned to Los Angeles, Chata told him she wanted a divorce. An angry Wayne agreed to a first-step formal separation. They chose their sixth anniversary to make the announcement to the public. “We had a disagreement,” Wayne told reporters. “She consulted well-known divorce-attorney-to-the-stars Jerry Giesler, but after when I came home and talked to her, I thought everything would be straightened out. I still hope and believe that it will be.” A contrite Wayne added, “I blame myself for our troubles. I devoted too much time to business and not enough to making a home for Esperanza and me.”

  But everyone close to the couple knew the real reason the marriage was failing was the constant and, to Wayne, unbearable presence of Chata’s mother, who was once again living with them. He was once again fed up with having her around the house. Not long after they announced their separation, trying to reconcile, Wayne met with Chata and told her, “Choose between your mother and me.” Chata chose her mother.

  A month later, Wayne announced that he and Chata had reconciled. It happened when Wayne had gone to San Francisco on business and injured his left ear. He claimed he had fallen off a chair. Wayne came home and into Chata’s bed. He forgave her, she forgave him, she cared for his ear, he nibbled hers, and all was peaceful again, but only for a few days. They erupted over something neither one could remember, and within days both consulted their lawyers.

  That same week in January 1952, Wayne was again named as the most popular actor in movies.

  ON MARCH 3, 1952, TIME magazine put him on the cover, in suit and tie, floating around his head drawings of cowboys, Monument Valley, and a giant cash register. The headline under Wayne’s image had a double meaning, the conservative weekly acknowledging Wayne’s abilities as an actor, and his reputation as a force behind the ongoing blacklist: Let the bad ’uns beware.

  Inside, the writing could not have been more effusive: “To millions of moviegoers and televiewers, in whose private lives good & evil often were dreary, inconclusive little wars, John Wayne is as reassuring as George Washington’s face on a series E bond . . .” To explain this, the magazine coyly critiqued what it was about Wayne that made him such a granite symbol of America by pointing out what he wasn’t: “Why does the U.S. public like him better than Betty Grable, Bing Crosby or Martin and Lewis? His legs are not as pretty as Betty’s; his voice is not as sweet as Bing’s; he is nowhere near as funny as Martin & Lewis. And he is not the best of Hollywood’s actors. In fact, it is an open question whether he can act at all.”

  After, when asked about Time’s description of his abilities, Wayne repeated his familiar refrain: “How often do I gotta tell you guys that I don’t act at all—I re-act.” He insisted that was what always saved him: “If it’s a bad scene, the loudmouth gets the blame. I like basic emotion stuff. Nuances are out of my line. If I start acting phony on the screen, you start looking at me instead of feeling with me. When I do a scene, I want to react as John Wayne.” Later on, he added sincerity as a reason for his success as an actor: “I got nothin’ to sell but sincerity, and I been sellin’ it like the blazes ever s
ince I started.”

  THE QUIET MAN PREMIERED ON July 21, 1952, to mixed reviews—the New York Times dismissed it as a “carefree fable of Irish charm and perversity.” The New Yorker, which had never had much use for Ford’s films, said it looked as if the director “had fallen into a vat of treacle”—and great box-office sales, grossing $3.2 million in its initial domestic release, and nearly twice that internationally. It undersored Wayne’s enduring popularity with the public and helped remove some but not all of the political tarnish that had settled on Ford’s once golden career.

  THE 1952 ACADEMY AWARDS CEREMONY was held March 19, 1953, at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood and at NBC’s Century Theatre in New York City, where part of the NBC telecast came from. Bob Hope was the host in Los Angeles, Conrad Nagel in New York. The Quiet Man was nominated for seven Oscars, including John Ford (Best Director), Best Picture—John Ford, Merian C. Cooper, and Republic, the first Best Picture nomination in Republic’s history—Hoch and Archie Stout for Best Cinematography, Victor McLaglen (Best Supporting Actor), Best Art Direction (Frank Hotaling, John McCarthy Jr., Charles S. Thompson), Best Sound (Republic Sound/Daniel Bloomberg), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Frank Nugent). Notably absent from the list were John Wayne for Best Actor and Maureen O’Hara for Best Actress.103

  That made it an especially galling night for Wayne, who had agreed to accept either or both the awards for John Ford if he won, after he told Wayne he either didn’t feel well enough to attend (or simply couldn’t stand to sit through the ceremonies; he never liked the idea of competitive awards for films). Wayne had been incensed over the Best Actor nominations, not just because he wasn’t included in the list, but because Gary Cooper was, for High Noon, a film Wayne detested on every level—cinematic, political, script, story, theme, direction. What made it worse was that it was a role Wayne had turned down before it went to Cooper, the other tall, strong, good-looking, conservative Hollywood all-American screen hero who spoke softly in his movies and carried a big gun.